


Forget About the Truffula Trees

by hellseries



Category: The Adventure Zone: Amnesty (Podcast)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 17:10:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17047220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellseries/pseuds/hellseries
Summary: Not all threats come from Sylvain.





	Forget About the Truffula Trees

**Author's Note:**

  * For [stickmarionette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/stickmarionette/gifts).



 

Green Bank telescope: Jarek Tuszyński / CC-BY-SA-3.0 & GDFL 

_Griffin: Previously, on The Adventure Zone…_

_Duck: Nah, he was up on the ridgeline and he was gone before I could get to him. I tried yellin’ at him, but he might’ve been wearin’ earbuds. But what I can’t figure out is, what was a surveyor doin’ in the middle of the forest?_

_Juno: Duck, honestly, I’m worried about you. I don’t know where your head’s been lately. They’re surveyin’ for the pipeline._

_Kirby: Oh yeah, I was just putting something together for Instagram. It’s supposed to go right through here. Ought to bring a lot of business to Kepler. Even before that, there’s bound to be protestors. The Cryptonomica could do really well out of it. What do you think about maybe doing themed box lunches?_

_Aubrey: I hate these people! Driving around in their fucking gas-guzzlers and thinking the world is theirs to destroy!_

_Ned: Which people do you mean, Aubrey? Do you mean people, let’s just take a random example, who used to drive classic vehicles now sadly destroyed in the service of the greater good, and who now drive overpowered snowcats, and act as unpaid Ubers so millennials can have their transportation needs met without getting their ideologically pure panties in a wad?_

_[Adventure Zone: Amnesty theme by Griffin McElroy plays]_

_Griffin: So Ned’s headed back to the Cryptonomica. Everyone else is just kind of looking like they wish they were going with him. Aubrey, what do you do?_

Aubrey stood in the shower, steam billowing around her as fireball after fireball bloomed around her clenched fist and was immediately quenched by the falling water. She'd had way too many accidents when she was in a mood like this. No way was she going to risk setting fire to the Lodge. And besides, this way she could cry all she wanted without tarnishing her badass image. She'd make sure to eat something really, hah, fiery after this, drunken noodles maybe. That would neatly explain the sniffles and the red eyes. Oh yeah, but nobody would see the eyes anyway because sunglasses, because weird freaky eye color change thing that she still hadn’t gotten around to telling Mama about….

Damn Ned anyway, the old fart. Hadn't she always respected his boundaries? Had she ever called him out on his bullshit, all his lies, the way he always hung back? Not that he'd been hanging back all that much lately. Unwillingly she remembered his crazy suicidal attack on the Pizza Hut sign. With a motherfucking jetpack. While she herself had been shivering in the snow like a catatonic dipshit.

Damn everybody. Damn government, damn oil companies, damn Mama for giving them grief about not killing Billy--not KILLING a creature who, yeah, he'd attacked them, but then he'd stopped, right? What were they supposed to do, just... just kill anything that might be a Bom-Bom? What about Thacker? Was he going to turn out to have a bunch of those white things with the arms inside him? Were they supposed to kill him to find out? Was that what those weird voices had been, or was this exactly what Mama had been talking about, with her warnings about how the Bom-Boms could mess with your head?

The water was getting cold as her fireballs got smaller and weaker. The last one barely sputtered before it was drowned out. Aubrey shut off the shower and toweled off fiercely.

_Griffin: Duck, Aubrey and Ned just stormed off in opposite directions. What do you do?_

"Welll... shit." Duck took off his hat, scratched his head and sighed. He looked around the lobby. Jake Coolice was pretending to take an intense interest in the windowsill. Maybe he was embarrassed by the scene that had just played out. Or maybe he was just really, really into wood grain at this particular moment. It could be hard to tell, with Jake.

"Anybody seen Moira?" asked Duck.

"I think she's down at the springs," Barclay volunteered.

"Damn. In this weather?"

Jake snickered, proving that he'd been more tuned in than he'd looked. "It's not like she's gonna get cold."

"Oh yeah. I guess that's right. Huh." Duck put his hat back on and moseyed out the door. An unappreciated skill, moseying. The appropriate gait for a fish-and-wildlife official who wasn't in _too_ big a hurry to see if a large burly fisherman actually had an up to date license. Or a park ranger who could maybe wait till another day to find out for sure whether there were open containers in that 4x4.  Not everyone could pull off a convincing mosey. Duck was a master.

Outside, the wind saved some time by going straight through him instead of all the way around. The surface of the spring had little wisps of mist on it, reforming as fast as they were blown away. There was nobody visible in the water, but Duck noticed a little gap in the strands of mist.

“Moira? If you’ve got a second, I could use your help with something.”

“I don’t meddle with Abominations, dear. My talents lie elsewhere.”

“Well, A, not an abomination, and B, I was kind of hoping to take advantage of your particular talents. And C, it’s in a good cause.”

“What cause?”

“Come to find out there is about to be a giant pipeline that’s going to pass right by here—and right by the archway too—and there’ll be about a 20-mile-long swath of trees that’ll be clearcut to make room for it.”

“That does indeed sound appalling, if only from an aesthetic standpoint.”

“Did I mention lots and lots of pipeline workers? And all the gas stations, convenience stores, truck stops, tattoo parlors, liquor stores, titty bars and mechanical bulls it takes to keep ‘em occupied?”

“You have my attention. Pray continue. What do you need?”

“I need to figure out how to stop it. Which means I might need to get some theoretical paperwork out of a potential filing cabinet that might conceivably be locked. Um, you can do that, right? When you pick something up, you can… kind of ghost it up? Bring it with you?”

“I can do that, yes.”

“Can you ride in a car?”

Moira was still invisible but somehow Duck could tell from her tone of voice that she was rolling her purely theoretical eyes. “Yes, Duck, I can ride in a car.”

“Fine. Fine. Excellent. Would you like to head over to Petersburg?”

“Before I say yes or no, we must come to an arrangement regarding the cost of this little venture.”

“Cost? Come on, Moira, isn’t a good deed supposed to be its own reward or something?”

“In this state I am bound by rules. I don’t make them, but I am subject to them nonetheless. And the rules say: for help asked and granted, there must be recompense. What can you offer?”

Duck rifled his pockets. “Uh, I got two throat lozenges, a box of matches, a bottlecap, an old pair of shoelaces and three dollars and eight cents in cash. And a bandana, but you probably don’t want that ‘cause it’s been getting a good bit of use, what with this wind.” While he had the bandana out, he put it to work.

“That would be correct. Nor am I interested in the rest of your paraphernalia. It is of no use to me.”

Duck pondered. “So what, you want… what, like, blood? Didn’t you say you used to be a vampire?”

Moira snorted. “Of what possible use would your blood be to me now? I have no corporeal form to nourish.”

“Oh. Huh. So what, then? Come on, help me out. It takes at least an hour and a half to get to Petersburg and they’re gonna close the office at 5. Earlier, probably. It’s Friday.”

“One of the few things that is of equal interest to a person in my state and a person in yours is information. The right information, in the right hands, is power. I require a truth from you.”

“Uh… two plus two equals four?”

“It turns out I already knew that. No. I want something rarer and more sensitive.”

Duck sighed. “Worth a try. Okay, go on.”

“Tell me of a time when you betrayed someone’s trust. Someone close to you. And it must be a tale no one else knows.”

_Griffin: Ned, let’s get back to you. Are you still hanging out at the Cryptonomica?_

Ned sauntered into the kitchen. (A saunter, though distinct from a mosey, requires an equal amount of finesse to achieve well. Ned had made a promising beginning, but he fell short of mastery by the slimmest of margins—one cannot simultaneously saunter and glance rapidly about the room to be sure the person one wishes to avoid is not present.)

Barclay nodded but didn’t speak. His hands were a blur as he rapidly diced an onion.

“Good afternoon, friend Barclay!” boomed Ned. He waved a hand theatrically in front of his face, blinking away pretend tears. “Hard at work I see!”

“Yes, actually,” said Barclay. “In a surprise twist, I am cooking. Which is astonishing because I am a cook. What can I do for you?”

Ned, keeping tabs on a bunch of carrots from the corner of his eye, squeezed past Barclay to the stove, where he began peeking under lids. Barclay took a deep breath in, held it, then exhaled slowly, his grip on the cleaver causing his knuckles to whiten.

“What delectable viands have you in store for us this evening?” said Ned.

“Beef goulash, no I’ve never been to Hungary, yes I know there’s a pun there, please get out of my kitchen now, and I saw you stuff those carrots in your waistband, I just don’t care. Go away, Ned.”

Ned went. He strolled ever-so-casually up the stairs and down the hall toward the room that happened to be Aubrey’s.

Two minutes later he strolled rather less casually and more rapidly back the other way, pursued by an angry voice. The door she’d slammed in his face hardly decreased the volume at all.

“Carrots are full of _sugar_! Dr. Harris Bonkers is on a very specific diet! Would you give a five-pound bag of sugar to a _diabetic_??”

“I didn’t—” he began to shout, but then shut his mouth as he heard the door to Mama’s office creak open. “I didn’t know,” he muttered, and retreated back to the Cryptonomica.

_Griffin: Duck, let's get back to you and Moira. She said the price of her help was that you tell her about a betrayal that nobody else knows about. What do you do?_

Duck stood silent for a long moment. He looked down at his feet and sighed. "All right. I don't guess it matters any more. So, uh, when I was eleven I had a dog. I'd had him for a while, actually, but this particular thing happened when I was eleven. This dog, uh, his name was Frost. You'd think with a name like that he'd be gray, but he was actually brown with a little black on him. My mom named him after Robert Frost. Uh, that's, he's a poet. Robert Frost, not the dog."

"I am aware of Robert Frost, yes. Though I don't seem to recall anything particularly canine about him."

"Nah, there wasn't--it wasn't Frost that was like the dog, it was the other way around. Kind of. Frost the dog had really, really long legs. He had some greyhound or something in him. Or we used to say giraffe. Anyway, he reminded my mom of Robert Frost, because Frost--the poet, not the dog--had a pair of shoes that he dipped one shoe in the Atlantic Ocean and the other shoe in the Pacific Ocean. My mom said every time she saw Frost--the dog, not the poet--stretch out, she remembered those shoes. So, Frost." 

Moira tapped one foot. She was in her mortal disguise, so the foot did make a sound, but it seemed a bit studied. Like really good Foley, almost self-congratulatory. "Is there a point to this--no. I refuse to stoop to 'shaggy dog story'. Is there a point to this narrative?"

Duck sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. "Yeah, guess I could cut to the chase. My sister, my little sister, she had really bad asthma attacks. I remember one Christmas Eve my mom was up all night with her in the bathroom, running the shower so the steam from the hot water would help her breathe. It kept getting worse. Finally our folks took her to see an allergist and he did some tests. Turned out she was allergic to half a dozen different things, and one of them was dog. So we couldn't keep a dog in the house, and it would have been too mean to make him live outdoors. So I took him to the shelter and I left him there." He winced, remembering. 

Moira raised a skeptical eyebrow. "I am sure your beloved pet _felt_ betrayed, but I hardly think this incident qualifies as a betrayal as such. And clearly, everyone else involved knew about it. You have not been paying attention."

Duck shook his head. "No. That's not it, that's not the betrayal part." He could still hear Frost whining, see the panicky look in his eyes as Duck went out the door. He'd woken up in the middle of the night for weeks, thinking he heard that whining outside his window. "That was just... the excuse for the bad part." He took a deep breath, closed his eyes. 

"I blamed her. I blamed my baby sister. I told her it was her fault, and that Frost was probably gonna be put to sleep, and it was all her fault and nobody--nobody would ever love her because she was so bad. And she believed me."

_Griffin: And Moira ponders this for a while, and then she says:_

_Moira: Acceptable._

_Griffin: So what's your plan?_

_Justin: We go to the Forest Service Headquarters, Moira goes in with me invisible, I get the lay of the land, and then after closing time she goes back in and brings paperwork out to me and I go through it until I find something we can use._

_Griffin: Okay, that could work. I don't know that we need to play that out right now. Let's get back to Aubrey. Aubrey, a few minutes after you chased Ned and his carrots off, there's a knock at your door. What do you do?_

"Go away!" yelled Aubrey.

"Okay," said a muffled voice.

"Not you!" Aubrey yelped, and scrambled off the bed to yank the door open. Dani stood outside with an oversized mug. It was steaming gently.

"I thought I'd see if you wanted to talk about it," she offered. "And Barclay thought you might like some hot chocolate."

"No and yes. I mean, maybe and definitely. I mean, I 'm not going to turn down hot chocolate, I'm not crazy, but if I try to talk about that asshole Ned I'm probably going to end up hurling it across the room, and that would obviously be a crime. Not to mention this whole thing with the pipeline--Dani, what are we going to do? I mean, what are _you_ going to do, the Sylphs? You can't have a bunch of strangers swarming all around, not to mention the pipeline itself, what if it messes up the springs or something--do we even know how close it's going to be to the Lodge?

Dani smiled, or tried to. It was a good effort. "I looked it up. It'll come within about a quarter of a mile of the Lodge, on the side away from the springs. But let's not panic yet. Duck and Moira went to try to find out something that might stop it, or slow it down. Maybe they can come up with something."

"Maybe," said Aubrey. She focused on the hot chocolate for a while. It was very pleasant, but it did make brooding more difficult. "I guess I'd rather have Duck and Moira on it than just have Mama doing a last stand with her shotgun."

"Even Ned might have something to contribute," said Dani. "He seems like the kind of guy who'd know how to sabotage a bulldozer."

"Ugh, don't put Ned between me and this hot chocolate, because I think I might throw up. Did you hear what he said to me?"

Dani was silent for a moment. "He wasn't... one hundred percent wrong," she said cautiously.

"Are you kidding me? 'Ideologically pure panties in a wad'?? Sexist much?"

"Yes. That was sexist. And condescending. And it's also not the part you're really upset about, because it's not the part that was uncomfortably true."

_Griffin: Duck, I'm gonna say that you and Moira have succeeded in what you were attempting to do, and that you have indeed found something useful. What does that look like? You've returned from your trip. Moira’s gone off to do whatever Moira does, and you’re reporting to Mama in the Pine Guard HQ. Ned and Aubrey, did you come down to hear Duck’s report?_

_Ned: Oh sure._

_Aubrey: I still pretty much hate everyone, so no._

“We’ve got it,” Duck said.

“Got what?”

“Got maybe a way to stop this pipeline, or at least slow it down a little, tangle it up some in the old ever-popular red tape.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“So, uh, I happened to just come across some background intel that was maybe not as secured as it could have been…”

“I do not want to hear any details about that whatsoever,” said Mama.

“Right, right. Well, so, among the interesting facts I learned was a surprising detail about the emergency plans that go along with this pipeline project. See, whenever you have some big project like this, you got to have all kinds of documentation. There’s your environmental impact statement, and you have to have a contingency plan for how you’ll do the project anyway even if you don’t get any funding, which is 100% bullshit but you have to have it no matter how made up and stupid it is…”

“Is there a point somewhere where this fascinating narrative actually becomes relevant to our predicament?” Ned wondered aloud, as if to the air.

“I’m gettin’ to it. So like I said, you have to have all this documentation and part of what you have to have is emergency plans. Like, if there’s a disaster or a fire or whatever, or a spill, I guess, in the case of a pipeline. And guess what this particular emergency plan did not take into account?”

“That there’s a colony of otherworldly cryptids in the path of said pipeline?”

“No. Well, obviously, not that either, but something they actually should have known. That we’re in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone. No cell service, and even ham radio gets bounced around and blocked out by the mountains. So they don’t actually have a way, at least a reliable way, to get messages out if there’s some kind of disaster. And nobody’s noticed.”

“How could nobody notice?”

Duck shrugged. “You’d be surprised how often emergency plans get read for the first time when something’s on fire.”

“You think that’s enough to throw a wrench into the works? I mean, if people never pay attention to these plans…”

“Oh, that’s not all. That’s just the opening salvo. We also found a whole slew of memos about how horrible the pipeline was, and how it would devastate the environment and how nobody had even bothered to demonstrate that we need a pipeline at all—and then all of a sudden one big memo that says ‘forget everything we said for the past 3 years, hell yeah pipeline woo hoo.’”

“Oh, that’s not suspicious at all.”

“Nope, and neither were the mysterious bank deposits that we also found—did we mention we stopped by the director’s house on the way back? He was gone to a Christmas party, but his checkbook stayed home.”

“Duck Newton. I am shocked, shocked that an officer of the law would stoop to such…” Ned’s poker face failed him before he made it to the end of the sentence and he doubled over, wheezing.

“So yeah. Moi—I mean, I took pictures of everything and we emailed it to Pro Publica and they said thank you very much and we should watch their Twitter feed for an announcement in the next couple of days.”

“Huh. I’ll believe it when I see it, I guess,” said Mama.

“I really think this could work,” said Duck. “I gotta tell Aubrey, she’ll appreciate this.”

“Can I tell her?” asked Ned. “It would, um, give me the opportunity to get a foot in the door.”

_Griffin: It’s a week later, another Friday. You’re back in the Lodge. Agent Stern went into town to see Ralph Breaks the Internet, so it’s a rare evening with everyone from Sylvain gathered in the lobby to socialize.  There’s a roaring fire. Aubrey, you’ve used the lodge’s cable modem to download the CNN story about the court ruling, and you’re reading it out loud to everybody._

“Forget about the Truffula trees,” read Aubrey. “The Lorax is now saving real-life forests.  A panel of federal judges in Virginia cited the beloved Dr. Seuss character to block the construction of an underground gas pipeline that would cross two national forests and a portion of the Appalachian Trail.  ‘We trust the United States Forest Service to “speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues,” the panel's ruling states, citing Seuss' orange environmental ambassador.’ Awesome.”

“’Orange Environmental Ambassador’ sounds like a particularly hipster cocktail,” said Ned. “You should get right on that, friend Barclay. If Kirby’s surmise is correct, there should be buses full of protestors arriving at any moment who may be disappointed that they have nothing left to protest. We could offer them a celebration instead.”

“I gotta hand it to you, Duck,” said Mama. “I didn’t give you enough credit. I guess there’s other kinds of protectin’ besides the kind that involves sneakin’ around with a shotgun at midnight.”

“Good job Duck! And good job Moira—oh, excuse me, I mean, _unnamed associates whoever and wherever they may be_ ,” said Aubrey.

“This calls for a toast!” said Ned. “Barclay?”

“Try this,” said Barclay, passing a tray of glasses out of the server’s hatch.

“To Duck!” Ned proposed.

“To the Pine Guard!” said Duck.

“Confusion to the petro-fascists!” said Aubrey.

“Mud in your eye,” said Mama.

“This isn’t nearly hipster enough,” said Jake Coolice. “Don’t you have, like, some tapioca balls or something?

And in the dark foyer, with his ear to the other side of the door, Agent Stern scribbled “Moira?” in a small notebook.

_[Adventure Zone: Amnesty theme by Griffin McElroy plays]_

 

**Author's Note:**

> I owe many, many thanks to the keepers of Taz Transcribed and The Adventure Zone Wiki! Also, although the CNN story (https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/16/us/dr-seuss-lorax-pipeline-forest-service-ruling-trnd/index.html) is real, all shenanigans financial and otherwise are surely fictional. Really. I'm sure everything about the Atlantic Coast Pipeline is completely aboveboard.


End file.
